Wikipedia:Simple News/Razorflame/2

Hello again. This time, I will be talking about writing articles here on the Simple English Wikipedia.

Writing articles

Many people join Wikipedia because they think that it will be easy to write an article about a topic that they are interested in. However, that is simply not the case. When you write an article, most of the time, if the article doesn't already exist on the English Wikipedia, you actually will have to do some research. Writing an article for the Simple English Wikipedia where no page exists on the English Wikipedia is like writing a research paper. It is long, boring, and most of time a lot of work. Therefore, article writing isn't for the faint of heart.

Most people think that the process of writing an article isn't much work, but I can tell you from experience that that is just simply not the case. Some of the articles that I have written on the English Wikipedia have involved a lot of time spent looking for sources across the Internet. In fact, the exact process that I use for writing articles is as follows:

1. Look for a topic that I am interested in.
2. Find a page in that topic where no page exists.
3. Load up Google.com and look for sources.
4. Find the sources.
5. Write the article.
6. Insert the sources into the article.
7. Format the article and put it into the mainspace.

Most articles that I write from scratch take me several hours to write, and this is just for a short, 5-7 sentence stub. Now imagine if you had to write a 10-15 kilobyte article. Most people that I know who write these long articles spend several days writing them. So, to reiterate, article writing isn't for the faint of heart. Razorflame 19:44, 15 March 2009 (UTC)